I’ve been putting some more thought into why villains tend to be more interesting and memorable than heroes.
Joker. Thanos. Vader. Hans Landa. Hans Gruber. Hannibal Lecter. And so forth.
I think part of it is intentional and part is unintentional.
An intentional reason is that a less dynamic hero gives the viewer or reader a simpler template in which to insert themselves, which is useful for certain types of stories, especially adventure-oriented ones. Like when we follow Luke Skywalker through the original Star Wars trilogy, in addition to following his development as his own character, the viewer is also kind of seeing the world through his eyes and thinking how cool it would be to be a jedi. Other characters with stronger personalities and screen presence are viewed more purely in external terms.
An unintentional reason is perhaps that more thought goes into villains. Creators put more conscious thought these days into making sure their villain is not tropey or one-dimensional. Like, you sprinkle a touch of good in with the bad. Or you give them good intentions for bad things they do. Something like that. People also did the same to heroes, by sprinkling in some bad with the good, and those tended to be more interesting and so anti-heroes became so common as to become overdone. But if you just want a hero, not an anti-hero, it can take more work to make them interesting and it often doesn’t get done.
Perhaps another -and super basic- reason could simply be average age. Heroes are often younger than villains. There’s less time and thus often less complexity for why they are the way they are. Like, Vader has just seen and done so much more than Luke. There are reasons for why Vader turned bad, but there aren’t really reasons for why Luke turned good. He just was a good kid raised by good adopted parents. Over time, he develops reasons to *stay* good, though, which is his character arc developing. By the third movie he’s older and thus a bit more complex of a character.
And perhaps yet another reason is instinct. Our brains are wired to respond faster and with more magnitude to threats than to good things. And so a character that embodies a threat of some type is more noticeable. And then often the character is doing things that stand out, or wearing things that stand out, or saying things that stand out, etc.
Often, it only takes one thing to make a villain interesting: just knowing why they’re the way they are. Evil is already interesting in a bad way, and so understanding why someone does evil things tends to interest us.
For example, we could pick some simplistic dark lords, which is a template that is known not to be very interesting. Sauron doesn’t really stand out to me other than visually. I don’t know anything about him, don’t know why he’s so mean, etc. It never really comes up in the trilogy, although he’s explored a bit more in Tolkien’s posthumously published worldbuilding lore.
How do we make that more interesting?
Well for example I think Brandon Sanderson does dark lords well. In his shared literary world that a lot of his books take place in, there was a god-like entity that was killed long ago, and shattered into 16 different shards, each representing a facet of its personality and power which people can obtain and become demigods. One of the shards is called Odium, which means hatred. He is described basically as God’s anger, separated from the context that would otherwise make that anger righteous. So it’s the hatred and anger of God, separated from the rest of God’s qualities. And he goes around killing the other shards to be the only one left. So with that basic setup or “why” answered, I’m like, “okay, I see what happened here,” and it pulls me in better even though the character itself is just… furiously evil with no redeeming qualities.
Anyway, part of why I’m thinking about this is because I’m thinking of more ways that creators could use to make heroes more interesting and memorable, without necessarily making them anti-heroes.
